Monza.

He ran towards her, trying to hold his breath, keep down low under the smoke. He caught her round the waist, she grabbed his neck, snarling. She had blood spotted across her face, soot around her nose and her mouth.

“Fire,” she croaked at him.

“Over here.” He turned back the way he came, and stopped still.

Down at the end of the corridor, two men with breastplates were getting to the top of the steps. One of them pointed at him.

“Shit.” He remembered the model. Cardotti’s backed onto the Eighth Canal. He lifted one boot and kicked the window wide. A long way down below, beyond the blowing smoke, water shifted, busy with the reflections of fire.

“My own worst fucking enemy,” he forced through his gritted teeth.

“Ario’s dead,” Monza drawled in his ear. Shivers dropped his sword, grabbed hold of her. “What’re you—” He threw her out of the window, heard her choking shriek as she started falling. He tore his shield from his arm and flung it at the two men as they ran down the corridor towards him, climbed up on the window ledge and jumped.

Smoke washed and billowed around him. The rushing air tore at his hair, his stinging eyes, his open mouth. He hit the water feet first and it dragged him down. Bubbles rushed in the blackness. The cold gripped him, almost forced him to suck in a breath of water. He hardly knew which way was up, flailing about, struck his head on something.

A hand grabbed him under the jaw, pulled at it, his face burst into the night and he gasped in cold air and cold water. He was dragged along through the canal, choking on the smoke he’d breathed, on the water he’d breathed, on the stink of the rotten water he was breathing now. He thrashed and jerked, wheezing, gasping.

“Still, you bastard!”

A shadow fell across his face, his shoulder scraped on stone. He fished around and his hand closed on an old iron ring, enough to hold his head above the water while he coughed up a lungful of canal. Monza was pressed to him, treading water, arm around his back, holding him tight. Her quick, scared, desperate breathing and his own hissed out together, merged with the slapping of the water and echoed under the arch of a bridge.

Beyond its black curve he could see the back of Cardotti’s House of Leisure, the fire shooting high into the sky above the buildings around it, flames crackling and roaring, showers of sparks fizzing and popping, ash and splinters flying, smoke pouring up in a black-brown cloud. Light flickered and danced on the water and across one half of Monza’s pale face—red, orange, yellow, the colours of fire.

“Shit,” he hissed, shivering at the cold, at the aching lag-end of battle, at what he’d done back there in the madness. He felt tears burning at his eyes. Couldn’t stop himself crying. He started to shake, to sob, only just managing to keep his grip on the ring. “Shit… shit… shit…”